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Debating Points

The editors of Campaign Stops asked columnists and contributors to weigh in with their early reactions to the presidential debate. Tune in here for regular updates. 1:09 a.m. | Updated

9:17 p.m. Lynn Vavreck|Who’s Still Thinking It Over?

One of the audiences President Obama and Mitt Romney will be trying to reach during the debate is undecided voters. So just how many of them are left? The latest YouGov poll for the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project puts the share of undecided voters at just shy of 3 percent. Roughly half of those people have been undecided since last year, but the other half have become undecided over the course of 2012 after initially preferring either Obama or Romney. Previously undecided voters making choices over these last few weeks continue to break slightly for the president, which is one of the reasons the first debate is crucial for Romney.

Political animals often generalize about the undecided, describing them as “low-information” voters. It turns out that they may have a point. Twenty-one percent of undecided voters report that they hardly pay any attention at all to news about politics and public affairs. Only 4 percent of the electorate as a whole says this. Takeaway: one-fifth of the undecided voters the candidates are trying to persuade tonight may not be watching.

10:18 p.m. | Updated The opening section of the debate is about the economy. Obama is taking credit for rebuilding the economy and bringing jobs back. Romney says the topic of jobs is “tender” and goes right to unemployment. How do undecided voters evaluate the president’s handling of the economy? The latest C.C.A.P. data show that undecideds approve of Obama’s performance less than the population as a whole, but that doesn’t mean they disapprove more. Here’s how it shakes out: 28 percent say they “don’t know” whether they approve or disapprove of President Obama’s handling of the economy. This underscores the consequences of undecided voters having less information than partisans: On many political questions, perhaps most, they don’t have opinions, including on whether the president has done a good job bringing the nation’s economy back.

11:18 p.m. | Updated Jim Lehrer asked if there was a difference between the two candidates on the role of the federal government. A few weeks ago, I asked 1,000 people in a YouGov poll the following question: If you could send one message to the federal government would it be “Leave me alone!” or “Lend me a hand!”?

Fifty-seven percent responded that they would tell the federal government to leave them alone. Among men, 64 percent would send this message to Washington (only 51 percent of women would say this). Even 32 percent of Democrats would say this, as well as 60 percent of independents.
On this question, there is very little difference between undecided and decided voters. At rates around 60 percent, both want the government to leave them alone.

11:18 p.m. Ross Douthat|Romney’s Big Step Forward

The way this debate played out made me half-suspect that Mitt Romney’s stumbling campaign strategy since he locked up the Republican nomination has just been an extended feint, designed to persuade President Obama that he would be facing a Republican candidate incapable of either articulating a clear message or reaching out effectively to the center. The president seemed to show up expecting to debate a deeply conventional Republican candidate, which Romney has all-too-often been. But instead he found himself facing a much more supple Romney, one capable of brushing off the charge that he just wants to cut taxes for the rich, using his Massachusetts record to his advantage in a way he couldn’t in the primaries, even attacking the president from a populist front on issues like “too big to fail” banks— and all the while pivoting, relentlessly and effectively, to the American economy’s anemic performance under Obama’s stewardship.

Romney did all this without committing himself to anything particularly new on any of these issues; indeed, late in the debate he actually returned to the defense of non-specificity that he’s employed before, arguing that it’s a mistake for a would-be chief executive to offer too many details lest it hamper him in negotiations once elected. But his overall fluency in policy was still striking: It made a remarkable contrast with basically every Republican nominee in my lifetime, and went a long way toward making the case for Romney as a supercompetent Mr. Fix-It that his campaign has been pushing, not always effectively, throughout this campaign.

Now fluency is not the same as perfect honesty: Romney had his share of bogus lines (the promise to cut the deficit by cutting funding for PBS was the stand-out) and dubious arguments (the distinctions he drew between Romneycare and Obamacare were technically true but frequently misleading) and frank evasions of important issues (his various pivots to the center, tellingly, didn’t include saying anything about how to help the uninsured).

But Romney profited immensely from the contrast with his opponent. Obama’s problem, simply put, is that he’s facing a continuing unemployment crisis and a looming deficit crisis and offering little except a stay-the-course message on both fronts. This debate threw that problem into relief. If Romney was sometimes slippery, the president was simply empty: He seemed exhausted, tetchy, and out of sorts, with no positive case for why his second-term agenda (whatever that is) would solve the country’s problems. Nor, to my shock, did he even have much a negative case either, against a Republican his campaign has been successfully caricaturing for months. Time and again, he failed to make obvious comebacks and exploit gaping openings, wasting time on throat-clearing and losing himself in a wilderness of “ums” and “ahs” instead. Remarkably, he actually spoke more than Romney — 35 minutes to 30 — but seemed to say much, much, much less.

I suppose there are ways that this debate could have gone better for the challenger, and worse for the incumbent. But I’m hard pressed to think of them right now.

12:41 a.m. Timothy Egan|The Zombie Bee

Zombie bees, we are told, are listless shells of their animated selves that bump around in the night without direction after being taken over by a parasite. It’s tempting to say an alien — passive, downward glancing, nonaggressive — took over President Obama during Wednesday’s presidential debate.

Or perhaps it was using John Kerry as his sparring partner.

Mitt Romney clearly was more aggressive, more chipper, better focused on attacks against the president. Forget about the zingers he rehearsed — a few were launched, though they sounded flat. Romney was loaded with the Mormon equivalent of Red Bull, and it showed.

On cosmetics, on delivery and on zip, Romney won. He may move some people who think he’s a cold, unlikeable plutocrat. He was a warmer, more likeable plutocrat. You can change the man — and Thursday night’s Romney was clearly a polished remodel — but you can’t change the policies.

The big news, aside from Obama’s flatness, was that Romney seemed to deny what he campaigned on for the last year– a massive new tax cut of 20 percent. It will cut taxes for the rich, a hugely unpopular idea. But Romney ventured into magical thinking and bizarre rhetoric on this, saying he will do nothing to raise the deficit, and therefore — presto — it’s not really a tax cut.

“I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” said Romney. But of course he does. That’s how it would work out in the calculus of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. So, did Romney just ditch his tax cut, after promising it all year?

Obama didn’t attack him, or dig deeper on that. He said, “Now, five weeks before the election, he’s saying that his big, bold idea is never mind.” Big, big missed opportunity. He should have pounded him on it. The math, as Bill Clinton stated so strongly in his convention speech, does not add up on the Romney plan.

Second, Romney again avoided any specifics on his cuts. Oh, Big Bird and P.B.S., sure, but that’s like saying you’ll tear down a house by chipping a single flake of paint from the garage. Obama didn’t press for specifics. Another missed opportunity.

And then, there was the non-mention of Romney’s claim that 47 percent of Americans are moochers. No mention, and therefore a Romney victory and a big whiff by the president. And no mention, or asking Romney to explain, how he can justify a billionaire paying a lower tax rate than a truck driver.

The press loves a cliffhanger, and a change in the narrative, and so it will be for the next few weeks — Romney revived. Now it’s up to the zombie bee to shed the alien and make Romney explain a year’s worth of bad policy ideas.

1:09 a.m. Stanley Fish|Romney’s Night

Mitt Romney on points, in all areas. The first sign that this was a Romney night came early, when the governor accused President Obama of championing “trickle down government,” Jim Lehrer asked the president to reply, and he didn’t — and the accusation stuck and was repeated later without response.

Nothing stuck to Romney, who was able to handle everything Obama pitched. He refused to accept the $5 trillion tax tag and declared that he won’t propose any tax cut that adds to the deficit. So he was able to say that he would cut taxes and he wouldn’t at the same time, without leaving any opening for an attack.

He handled easily an issue that some thought would trip him up — the similarity of his own Massachusetts health plan to Obamacare (a coinage the president welcomed). He didn’t run away from Romneycare, but embraced it. He didn’t tout it as a model everyone should follow; rather, he offered it as a model of what states can do when they come up with a program that fits their particular situations. So he was able to stand up for what he did in Massachusetts without tying himself to it in a way that would have made for a contradiction when he said, as he did immediately, that he would repeal Obamacare on Day One.

He then took the opportunity to highlight an important difference between himself and the president, when he pointed out that his health care plan was the result of bipartisan co-operation because it had to be — 87 percent of the Massachusetts legislature was Democratic during his term — while Obama was famously unable to get a single Republican vote. An Obama partisan might say that all this proved was Republican intransigence; but that’s not how it came across. It came across both as a fact (I did it by reaching across the aisle) and as a promise (when I’m president I’ll do it again) — a promise he made again near the end.

When it came time for a closing statement, Romney had one ready (the president didn’t) — a point-for-point contrast between what would happen were Obama re-elected and what he would do were he victorious. Earlier he chided Obama for not embracing Simpson-Bowles, and when the president replied, weakly, that he was even now trying to put some of its recommendations in place, the governor got off the zinger of the night — “you’ve been president for four years,” an observation that no doubt struck home with some disappointed Obama supporters as well as with Republicans.

For his part, Obama was disjointed, convoluted in his speech and halting in his delivery. The “uh” that pops up in an irregular fashion when he talks — it’s a tic rather than a sign of hesitation — was particularly discombobulating, and it contributed to the impression of someone who just didn’t have his act together.

The visuals were also bad for Obama. He filled less of his side of the split screen than Romney did. He seemed smaller in stature just as he seemed smaller in substance. Even Romney’s tie was better. Obama did occasionally flash a smile that gave promise of a more relaxed, confident and exuberant performance. But that promise was never redeemed. The best that could be said of him is that he was likable enough.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.